Inkscape

color gets darker when printing

Asked by David

I have created many renderings in inkscape that appear the way I want them on my computer screen. When I go to print on t-shirts with a digital printer, or color copier the colors appear much darker. This changes the contrast of my illustrations and makes them less attractive. Before I go into all my illustrations and lighten all the individual objects, I wanted to find out an easier way. This is possibly from converting files from .SVG to jpg or something else.

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Hachmann (marenhachmann) said : 		#1

This is probably a problem caused by non-calibrated hardware. There are special tools (spectrometers) to calibrate a monitor to show 'correct' colors (price range about 50-300 Euros). To get a color-safe printer, you would have to buy a professional model, which is quite expensive, too.

This has nothing to do with any file format conversion, as the underlying colors and their values don't change (unless you use a color profile in the conversion).

I guess the easiest way to do this would be to export to png, open in a raster graphics editor (like gimp) and then adjust colors for the whole picture, test print and repeat until happy ;-)

Or you could try to adjust your monitor's settings in a way that it more resembles the printed result... (not fun).

And don't forget that the T-Shirt printing service (if you don't do it yourself) will still convert the colors from RGB to CMYK, which may bring additional changes...

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